guns

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

militia

I don’t agree with everything in Michael’s  take-down of a comment by Eric R. to my post, “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post,” but as an example of the genre ( mastered on Ethics Alarms by the 2011 Commenter of the Year tgt and others), it’s a gem. The main point, that the Second Amendment has significant symbolic value as a right that reminds the government that the citizens of a democracy will not bare their throats to central power, is a crucial one, which I touched on in an earlier Ethics Alarms post. An armed insurrection against the government would be a catastrophe, of course. Still, while those Americans who believe that arming citizens against possible government tyranny trust too little, the citizens who argue that the government should be able to disarm the populace in the name of safety trust far too much.

I did remove one small non-substantive part of the post, because I really dislike mockery as a device on Ethics Alarms (the unedited comment is still under the original post.) I particularly think Michael’s identification of the reasons underlying the recent spate of mad dog killings is seriously off the mark. My own list, in order of influence would be…

  1. The difficulty of getting seriously disturbed individuals institutionalized, and the lack of places to keep and treat them.
  2. The availability of assault-type weapons to such disturbed individuals.
  3. The failure to enforce existing gun regulations
  4. The increasing difficulty and complexity of life generally, making it harder for those who are poor, poorly trained, not especially bright, or emotionally fragile to compete and succeed.
  5. The pervasive media, which creates false norms of success and happiness that are unachievable for most Americans.
  6. The culture of guns and violence, which is intensified by the entertainment media, but which is also a core American characteristic that isn’t going away.
  7. The publicity given to mass murderers by the news media.

But I digress.

Here is Michael’s tough Comment of the Day, to the post “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post”. The bold sections below are quotes from Eric’s comment: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quiz: Holder’s ‘Brainwash’ Comment”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

"You want 'consensus'? I'll give you consensus, Pilgrim..."

Penn, who has been on a roll lately, has another Comment of the Day regarding the prospects of a cultural shift in public attitudes toward guns in America. I’ll have some thoughts afterwards, but right now, here is Penn COTD on the post, Ethics Quiz: Holder’s “Brainwash” Comment:

“I’m seeing a problem here that’s as insoluble as “what to do with the homeless.”  It comes up again and again: defending the right to bear arms against teaching non-violence — okay, that’s simplistic, but I think you know what I mean. Since arguments on both sides have been validated, their proponents feel duty-bound to reiterate them.

“Granted, consensus is a no-go in our culture. You win or you lose: compromise is a dirty word, and a win/win situation, while given lip service as a goal (e.g. good sportsmanship), is not an acceptable outcome.  Thus neither argument, in theory or in practice, takes a step further in solving in the short-term the problem of what to do with an increasingly violent society (schools, families, criminals, celebrities, etc.), a society embedded in an ever-shrinking, increasingly threatening world. Thinking that these guns/no guns arguments have some pragmatic use keeps us, so to speak, backward. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Holder’s “Brainwash” Comment

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

"You WILL feel differently about guns!"

The death of founder Andrew Breitbart hasn’t slowed down his website’s ability to dig up provocative and embarrassing videos one bit. Its latest is a bit of off-putting rhetoric from Eric Holder, when he was the Clinton Administration U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., telling a D.C. audience that the long-term solution to gun control is to “brainwash” the  public into opposing firearms. Holder said…

“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”

He went on to outline steps that could be taken to “really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.”

Seeing this as a major “gotcha” for the embattled Attorney General, who is already facing growing criticism both for his oversight (or lack of it) of the Fast and Furious gun-smuggling fiasco and his evasive testimony about it before Congress, conservative critics are jumping on the 1995 statement to bolster calls for Holder’s resignation.

Your Ethics Quiz today: Is it fair to criticize a U.S. Attorney General’s statement that he wants to “brainwash” the  public into rejecting a core Constitutional right, when the statement is more than 15 years old, and was made while he was in a different job? Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz, Killer Pizza Edition: Can School “No-Tolerance” Be Dumber Than THIS?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I grant you: THIS is a scary pizza. What Nick Taylor had, however, was not.

Nicholas Taylor is 10-years-old and attends David Youree Elementary School in Smyrna, Tenn., 30 miles southeast of Nashville. He is currently serving a week-long sentence at “the quiet table” during lunch time and has had to endure gun safety lectures. What was his terrible offense?

He “threatened” other students at his lunch table with a piece of pizza that was shaped vaguely like a gun because of the bites that had been taken out of it. Yes, some pathetic, parent and culture-warped weenie of a fellow student complained to a teacher that Nick was making “threatening gestures” with his partially-eaten pizza-gun.  Taylor denied it. That meant he was lying. More punishment.

Your Ethics Quiz Question—and you better not get this one wrong!—is : Can political correctness “no-tolerance” idiocy in the schools get any worse than punishing a child for the shape of his pizza slice? Continue reading →

A Cautionary Ethics Tale From Texas

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

A Good Samaritan Teddy could relate to

In Texas, a 62-year-old man pulled over on the highway to help a couple whose truck had run out of gas. While he was assisting, the Good Samaritan apparently objected to the demeaning way the 31-year-old husband was addressing his wife, and said so. The husband then attacked the older man…who drew his concealed gun and shot him in the shoulder.

<sigh> Continue reading →

Solution to the Starbucks Gun Controversy: Try Ethics!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Starbucks is under fire from anti-gun advocates for its policy of allowing patrons in states that permit open carrying of firearms to sip their espresso with guns on their hips. This has, of course, provoked the usual high dudgeon from Second Amendment supporters, NRA members, conservative media, and—who knows?—maybe a few postal workers getting ready to blow. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: School Principal Evelyn Matroianni

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Reading news stories about cruel, power-abusing, or judgement-deficient teachers and school administrators is like eating potato chips, I’ve discovered. Once you start, it’s hard to stop. Luckily for my waistline and cholesterol levels, eventually potato chip bags become empty. Unfortunately, the supply of terrible tales of student abuse appears to be bottomless.

In Staten Island,  9-year-old Patrick Timoney, a fourth-grader at PS 52, South Beach, was observed by his school principal playing with LEGOs during his lunch period.  One of the LEGO action figures was carrying what appeared to be a toy automatic weapon. The principal,  Evelyn Matroianni took Patrick, crying and frightened, into her office, and called the boy’s mother. She told her that she considered the toy a violation of the no-tolerance rule prohibiting guns and gun replicas, and that she was going to confirm this with a security administrator from the city Department of Education. Continue reading →